Trying to Use the Saw But Spare the Forests; 80 Years Later, Logging Rebounds

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: November 17, 1997

FISHKILL, N.Y., Nov. 12—
A half-ton log of white oak cut from a Hudson Valley tree thumped from a sorting rack into the mud. ''That one's going to Spain,'' said Brian Arico as he pulled a lever that sent another log rolling in front of him.

Next in line on the rack were several logs of red oak, twice as thick as telephone poles, cut north of Danbury, Conn. ''All this red oak's going to Japan and Indonesia,'' said Mr. Arico, 32, a former logger who has built a thriving company here 50 miles north of New York City, where he exports the hidden bounty of the region's rebounding forests to buyers around the world.

Eight decades after the last wave of clear-cutting for farmland and charcoal sheared the forests of New York and Connecticut, oak, maple, cherry, tulip poplar and other trees have matured into lofty stands that are prized on the growing world market for logs and lumber.

As a result, almost invisibly, a substantial logging industry has returned to the wooded areas ringing New York City, with chainsaw-wielding crews offering landowners thousands of dollars to extract valuable trees in areas as close to the city as Westchester and Fairfield County, Conn.

The re-emergence of logging has been driven in part by growing demand for maple and oak, partly because of changing tastes in places like Japan, where the blond wood is now favored over darker, tropical wood varieties, according to several forestry economists. New York and Connecticut have also seen a sharp rise in the harvest of softwood trees like pine, because of sharply reduced cutting on Federal lands in the Pacific Northwest.

The trade means that wooded lots in the region -- if properly managed -- can represent a bonanza for property owners, providing steady income for decades. But it has also spurred some owners to do ''liquidation cuts,'' in which all the valuable trees are taken at once, with no thought to the ecology of the forest.

State environmental officials in New York and Connecticut have created programs to encourage logging methods that keep the forests healthy. Nonetheless, unscrupulous logging crews occasionally cruise neighborhoods to dangle offers of big money, and leave ragged, muddy messes behind. In some cases, timber theft occurs when a cutting crew strays across a property line, lured by a prime specimen of cherry or oak.

Many communities, concerned about the impact of such cutting, have enacted ordinances that limit, or even prohibit, logging. The moves to limit logging have also been driven by the widespread perception among suburbanites that all logging is akin to the destructive practices highlighted in films about the deforestation of the Amazon region or the Pacific Northwest, state environmental officials say.

But state officials and many loggers say that predatory practices are the exception, and that local laws are stifling what could be a profitable and environmentally sound business.

Unlike the clear-cutting in the rain forest, in most cases in the New York region only mature trees are taken, allowing smaller trees to soak up the sunlight flowing through the new gaps in the leafy canopy, and potentially providing another crop of wood 10 or 15 years down the line.

''People think logging is a lot of greed and mess, but if you do it right it helps the animals and the woods,'' said Michael Shultis, a logger who scours the Catskills for prime stands.

He and other people in the industry say that logging a standing forest is far better than having it sold off to developers, who are increasingly subdividing the land.

''That is a one-way street, and then we've lost a resource forever,'' said Jeffrey Wiegert, a senior forester for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Mr. Wiegert helps run a program that offers landowners tax breaks for long-term commitments to forest harvesting.

Recently, Mr. Wiegert hiked into the woods to oversee a crew completing a three-week cutting job at Camp Surprise Lake, a 638-acre summer camp near the Putnam County village of Cold Spring. Michael Ferrucci, a forester from Madison, Conn., had drawn up a decadeslong management plan for the site, leaving a mix of mature and younger trees that would provide harvests well into the next century.

''They're going to smooth the ruts, lay down mulch and seed,'' Mr. Ferrucci said of the cutting crew's work. ''In a couple of years, you won't know they were here.''

Squatting on a pile of freshly cut logs that was headed for a sawmill upstate, Mr. Ferrucci carefully counted rings, finding that almost every tree had lived 88 years. ''That was probably the last clear-cut for charcoal for the foundries in Cold Spring,'' Mr. Ferrucci said.

Since that time, forests across New York State have rebounded. In all, the state's forest cover has more than tripled in this century, from 20 percent 100 years ago to 62 percent today.

Mr. Ferrucci said that the history of the forests -- reclaiming what had been open fields -- also helped shape the stands into the valuable resource they have become. Red oak, now prized overseas, has become a dominant species here because it is one of the first type of tree to colonize abandoned fields, he said.